Ella, mi Sagrada Madre
Dr. Xochitl Alvizo questions gendered Spanish and English God-talk
English vs. Spanish God-Talk
Gloria a Dios en el cielo,
y en la tierra paz a los hombres que ama el Señor.
Por tu inmensa gloria te alabamos, te bendecimos,
te adoramos, te glorificamos, te damos gracias,
Señor Dios, Rey celestial,
Dios Padre todopoderoso.
Señor, Dios, Padre – that’s what I used to call God in Spanish.
Spanish is a gendered language. Unlike the neutral article “the” in English, in Spanish, every object is assigned an article that is either masculine or feminine—el señor, la señora—as well as singular or plural—los señores, las señoras.
It therefore took me a while to notice that my Spanish God-talk—Señor, Dios, Padre—was very male. Seemingly par for the course, I didn’t even think about it and took the language for granted. Even after my immersion into and love of feminist theology, my primary ways of referencing God in Spanish remained undisrupted, “Señor” my immediate go-to term.
One day, a friend called my attention to this:
“Why do the critiques that feminist theologians bring to our God-talk in English not also apply to your God-talk in Spanish?”
I was at a loss. She was right. My response was that I didn’t think of “him,” el Señor, the same way in Spanish as I did about “the Lord” in English. I even explained that, “in Spanish, my God is not patriarchal”. She thought this an interesting phenomenon and left it at that. Perhaps she just took it for granted, as I had.
Many scholars, especially feminist scholars, have expanded our God-talk in English in response to such critiques. For example, we no longer use the “He” pronoun for God, but “Godself” instead. However, we have not taken the same steps forward in Spanish.
Now I see that she let me off the hook much too easily.
The whole time I was growing up in Los Angeles, my family was part of a Spanish-speaking Catholic church. And even though I now identify as Protestant and am an active member of my denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), my experiences with Catholicism and with my Catholic family were positive and enriching. It was only after I went to college and considered the tradition for myself that I decided not to identify with a church that refuses to recognize and affirm the calling of women to ordained ministry. I therefore chose a different denomination from my home church.
Yet, as I moved into Protestantism and applied my feminist lens to my English-speaking faith tradition, my inherited Spanish God-talk remained fully intact, the language as male-centered as ever when I spoke of God with my Spanish-speaking family. Meanwhile, in English, my language and metaphors for the divine and all things sacred expanded.
My friend’s question was now forcing me to ask myself:
“Why am I still perfectly at home with my Señor?”
Feminist Theology vs. the Church
Feminist theologians pioneered their work out of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s and early 70s. Effectively, these early feminist theologians called the church out on its thoroughly embedded sexism. They highlight the church’s historically deep, regrettable, and limited pattern of almost exclusively using patriarchal language, symbols, and institutional leadership structures in collective ways of being church. Feminist theologians raise concerns that such predominantly male Christian leadership structures and forms of expression for the divine are mostly male and patriarchal, with inherent biases against women.
But we have yet to apply those first feminist theologians’ lessons and critiques to Spanish ways of speaking and being church. We have even yet to notice that we already speak of church as a “she” in English and use the feminine iglesia in Spanish.
A deep concern of feminist theologians is how these embedded male-centered patterns shape and form us in detrimental ways, both as individuals and as communities. Knowing that what we practice in church has corresponding realities in our social and political world, we have to ask:
“What are churches effectively teaching and embodying in relation to gender?”
Sexist words can be seen as but the tip of an enormous iceberg. Sexist wording over a long period in our history has evoked such sexist imagery that in spite of recent publications on inclusiveness these images have established themselves with a life of their own deep in our culture and in our psyches.
—Nelle Morton, The Journey Is Home (Beacon Press, 1986), pg. 194
Divine vs. Human Design
Language and symbol systems very concretely construct reality. The church must therefore think critically about how our use of language, symbols, rituals, and institutional patterns are forming us as Christians, and whether it is doing so in liberative ways. The church must be conscious of the character it is helping to shape of la iglesia de Dios, el cuerpo de Cristo.
One of the theological implications of falling into fixed, recurring patterns of God-talk and of organizational structures within the church is the limitations they impose on both the divine and on the believer. These patterns become so subconsciously embedded and fixed that we end up rigidly holding onto them and making idols of our divine metaphors. Or, when relating to one another communally, as a single body, these patterns box in the otherwise expansive ways the divine can work in our lives--much beyond the gendered social patterns we attribute to divine design.
But it is human design that shapes the God-talk through which we communicate with God and the world, and understand her relationship to us. It is human design that determines who gets to have their idea of a divine image celebrated and affirmed through the language, symbols, images, and rituals of the church. Human design chooses what characteristics of the divine we elevate and praise, and whose vocation and ministry we ordain and affirm. By reexamining the human design in our ecclesial organizational and decision-making structures, we can perhaps come to a deeper understanding of who we are as a body of Christ within the vastness of our gendered reality.
Image: Public domain
Sagrada Madre vs. Señor
So why was I was still perfectly at home with my Señor, without experiencing my Spanish God-talk as problematic? Maybe I had fallen into too comfortable a place in my Spanish God-talk that I was unwilling to raise a critique. Maybe I held my Spanish-speaking Catholic upbringing with affection and a little too tightly for fear that I might lose something--memories, culture, language--precious to me.
Do these questions effectively close me off to a more expansive, richer experience of Ella, mi Sagrada Madre?
“In turn, what might I gain by daring to address God in a new way? ”
What wounds might new prayers help heal?
What persons might feel newly celebrated and affirmed by the church – perhaps for the first time?
What can we draw from the expansive resources of our tradition and its scripture to bring an emancipatory lens to our God-talk and new life to our body?
Let us begin to find answers by daring to open ourselves up to Her spirit for the sake of living into a new divine reality, en la tierra como en el cielo:
Gloria a nuestra Sagrada Madre en el cielo,
y en la tierra paz al pueblo de su corazón.
Por tu inmenso y semejante amor te alabamos, te bendecimos,
te adoramos, te glorificamos, te damos gracias,
Señora Diosa, Reina celestial,
Ella que es todapoderosa.
